Introduction

Your work in this module will be dedicated to exploring 4 important organic macromolecules. These 4 macromolecules (proteins, lipids, carbohydrates, and nucleic acids) make up 96% of your body mass. At the cellular level, these molecules play critical roles in the structure and the overall function of the cell. As mentioned in Module 1, this is a building course, so you want to bring what you learned in Module 2 (the chemistry of life) to your work on this module. Understanding the chemical nature of the subunits, or monomers, that make up these polymers, is essential to understanding their “work” at the cellular level.

A central theme in biology, and science in general, is “structure equals function”. In other words, organisms, environments, and molecules work the way they do (function) because of how they are built (their structure/ their chemical make-up). This module is an excellent example of this concept in that many of the large, organic molecules we will discuss; carbohydrates, lipids, proteins, and nucleic acids, are all critical to the general function of your body and what allows for their respective functions is 100% a result of their structure. Please review the examples of large, organic molecules discussed in the text. ¹